Individual Differences

Rosenhan

AIM: To test the hypothesis that psychiatrists cannot reliably tell the difference between people who are sane and those who are insane

1st STUDY METHOD: field experiment. IV was the made up symptoms of the pseudo patients, & the DV was the psychiatrists' admission & diagnostic label of the pseudo patient. 8 sane people, attempting to get into 12 different hospitals, in 5 different states in the USA. There were 3 women & 5 men. They said the voice, which was unfamiliar & the same gender as themselves, was often unclear but it said 'empty', 'hollow', 'thud'. All were admitted, diliked the experience and none were detected.

2nd STUDY METHOD: the staff, who were aware of the 1st, were falsely informed that during the next 3 months more pseudo patients would attempt to be admitted. Staff were asked to rate on a 10-point scale each new patient as to the likelihood of them being a pseudo patient.

This false information was the manipulated IV, & the DV was the number of patients which staff subsequently suspected of being pseudo patients

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Thigpen & Cleckley

Background: MPD is defined as a dissociative disorder in which 2 or more distinct personalities coexist within one individual. It is an example of a neurotic disorder

AIM: to provide an account of the psychotherapeutic treatment of a 25-year-old woman who was referred to Thigpen & Cleckley because of 'severe & blinding headaches'

At first EB could only be called with hypnosis, but they managed to call her out by asking EW. Jane just apeared a few months later. They think Christina Sizemore created new personalities with ideal characteristics to deal with events she couldn't deal with

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Griffths

Background: in terms of gambling, the six most important cognitive distortions that regular gamblers use are, illusion of control, flexible attributions, representativeness, availability bias, illusory correlations and fixation on absolute frequency

AIM: The aim of this study was to investigate cognitive bias involved in gambling behaviour. There were 4 hypotheses:1. There would be no difference between r & n-r fruit machine gamblers on objective measures of skill2. R gamblers would produce more irrational verbalisations than n-r gamblers3. R gamblers would be more skill orientated than n-r gamblers on subjective measures of self-report4. A further hypothesis was also added that thinking aloud participants would take longer to complete the task than non-thinking aloud participant

MTHOD: quasi experimental. IV is whether participants are r or n-r gamblers. DV are objective measurements of skill on the fruit machine, the content analysis of utterances from the thinking aloud method & the subjective measures of skill perception from the post-experimental interview. A further IV was created by a half of both the r & n-re gamblers being randomly assigned to the 'thinking aloud' condition

SAMPLE: 60 participants. 44 were males and 16 were females. Split into 2 groups, then split into 2 conditions